Can a virus cause passwords to expire on a network?

At my job every network login that did not have the "password never expires" checkbox checked in Active Directory was prompted to change passwords. Individually, user accounts did not have a expiration date. After looking more in depth I found a group policy for the entire district where passwords have a max age of 45 days. However, I don't believe that anyone specifically set that. Can a virus set that policy?

In addition we had to temporarily shut down our firewall that was incorrectly blocking secure traffic.

I know it sounds crazy to complain that a security policy is suddenly enforced. However, the odd thing is that ALL the passwords expired at the same time even though passwords were definitely not assigned at the same time and many were, according to the policy, expired days months and even possibly years ago.

On the opposite side, is there anything that would have prevented the policy from working normally that suddenly allowed it (perhaps the firewall was blocking a network trigger message)?

the one and only time I faced a virus changing my password on a server was for my SA password on MSSQL. never for security policy. either way, if your policy remains on 45 days, just leave it as is an d monitor it a bit. see if it actually exparies on 45 days. maybe you have forced the group pilicy forcing the passwords to expire on the same day!!
you could always try setting it to a lower number for easier monitoring
regards

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